The anonymous whistleblower who has upended Washington and seeks to bring down a president admits that he has no first-hand knowledge of the dealings between President Donald Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

He or she says that the information came from people who told other people about the supposedly damning content of the Trump-Zelensky phone call.

How did the whistleblower find out that Trump had committed an impeachable offense? He heard it through the grapevine!

Now it comes out that the Intelligence Community  the sponsor of this coup that is seeking to topple a duly elected president  smoothed the way for the whistleblower in advance of his complaint.

It seems that before this whistleblowerâ€™s complaint, the administrative requirement to forward the case to Congress was that the whistleblower have first-hand knowledge of the events involved.

The regulation quite specifically stated that "in order to find an urgent concern â€˜credible,â€™ the Intelligence Community Inspector General must be in possession of reliable, first-hand information. The ICIG cannot transmit information via the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act based on an employeeâ€™s second-hand knowledge of wrongdoing."

The regulation specifically bars proceeding with the complaint if the information on which it is based "is received from another person, such as when a fellow employee informs you that he/she witnessed some type of wrongdoing.

Similarly, speculation about the existence of wrongdoing does not provide sufficient basis to meet the statutory requirements of the ICWPA. If you think wrongdoing took place, but can provide nothing more than second-hand or unsubstantiated assertions, ICIG will not be able to process the complaint or information for submission as an ICWPA."

The language is quite clear and the Ukraine phone call whistleblower did not qualify.

According to an article by GianCarlo Canaparo and Thomas Jipping of the Heritage Foundation, on Sept. 30, ICIG Michael Atkinson issued a news release acknowledging that, under the policy existing when he received this complaint, he could not have deemed it credible and reported it to the director of national intelligence.

So how did it see the light of day? Canaparo and Jipping say that he processed the complaint "under a policy allowing second-hand information  a policy that he did not establish until after he received that complaint."

The intel community, so eager to oust Trump that they engineered the phony charges of collusion with Russia, changed the rules in the nick of time to let the complaint proceed.

It was a setup. An inside job.

The anonymous whistleblowerâ€™s friends and partisan allies are maintaining a wall of silence and, in the leaky environment of Washington, D.C. are resolutely refusing to reveal the identity of the man or woman whose surmises (as opposed to first-hand knowledge) are being used to trigger a presidential impeachment for only the third time in American history.

How are we to judge the credibility of the whistleblower if we cannot know his or her name? If we cannot vet him for partisan bias? If we canâ€™t find out if he has a past record of reckless and false allegations?

There is a reason the Constitution requires that defendants have the right to "confront" their accuser. This requirement applies no less to the president than to a third-grade felon.

It is just too bad if revealing his identity might subject him to retaliation. And it is not credible that the FBI could not protect him from physical harm.

He should have realized he was playing for big stakes when he filed his complaint and understood that he would be outed publicly.